On March 16, 2009, AMD filed a Form 8-K with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission detailing a notification given by Intel. It reads as follows:

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (the “Company”) has received correspondence from Intel Corporation (“Intel”) related to the 2001 Patent Cross License Agreement between the Company and Intel (the “Cross License”). In this correspondence, Intel (i) alleges that the Company has committed a material breach of the Cross License through the creation of the Company’s GLOBALFOUNDRIES joint venture and (ii) purports to terminate the Company’s rights and licenses under the Cross License in 60 days if the alleged breach has not been corrected.

The Company strongly believes that (i) the Company has not breached the terms of the Cross-License and (ii) Intel has no right to terminate the Company’s rights and licenses under the Cross License. Under the terms of the Cross License, there is an escalating procedure for resolving disputes, and the Company has commenced the application of that procedure with respect to Intel’s purported attempt to terminate the Company’s rights and licenses under the Cross License. In addition, the Company has informed Intel that the Company maintains that Intel’s purported attempt to terminate the Company’s rights and licenses under the Cross License itself constitutes a material breach of the Cross License by Intel which gives the Company the right to terminate Intel’s rights and licenses under the Cross License Agreement while retaining the Company’s rights and licenses under the Cross License Agreement.

At last report, AMD had escalated the issue and requested arbitration to resolve the dispute. There has been no notification by either company publicly about the current status, and the 60-day time period from the original March 16, 2009 deadline comes up on Friday May 15, 2009. The Form 8-K also has a “Date of earliest event reported” of March 11, 2009, which would indicate last Sunday was the last date.

When I spoke previously with legal representative Chuck Mulloy of Intel, and emailed with AMD legal representatives, the issue on the table was a claim made by AMD specifically in response to Intel wanting to make the entire x86 cross-license agreement public. Intel believed AMD had violated the agreement and wanted to make the agreement, which today is under a privacy seal, to be made public so everybody could see the conditions for themselves. AMD agreed to these terms, provided Intel also removed the secrecy lid off its anti-trust evidence, to which Intel flatly refused — and now we know why, it showed their guilt.

At that time, Mulloy told me that a resolution would likely be very forthcoming. To my knowledge, one has not yet been had. And now that Intel has been found guilty, AMD may be in a far better position to ensure the x86 cross license continues unabated, and perhaps even (in some ways) more to their advantage.

Reader Comments

lennard

AMD is not allowd to transfer the license to any joint venture which is what they’re trying to do now….and this makes it wrong and puts intel in the right. however, with the case against them in EU will def through a bad light in them at this point, and i know amd isn’t going to try to use it to their advantage.

awesomeo

Patents, copyrights, etc should have a firm 20-25 year limit. Intel
may have created x86 in 1978, but it has far outgrown their control.
Retaining such power on something created over 30 years ago is not only
wrong, but bad for competition.

graphene

patents actually _do_ have a 20 year time limit.. this dispute is probably about some kind of refinement to x86 technology created less than 20 years ago

Rick Hodgin

Globalfoundries is a fabrication facility. They are not doing x86 design, just fabbing the designs AMD, the license holder, generates.

Khue K

Isn’t there some sort of Licensing being provided for x86-64 from AMD to Intel? If so, I wonder if AMD could find some sort of breach of contract and pull Intel’s x86-64 licensing.

awesomeo

That is a very interesting point there about x86-64. If intel is going to be a huge crybaby, they need to know that such things can go both ways!

lennard

@rick: yes it is a fab but it isn’t AMD and the license are to AMD not globalfounderies there is the problem thats why AMD is in breach of contract for trying to transfer un-transferable licenses. AMD is in breach not intel, so if intel wants to cut the deal they had on their part they should be ok to do so. The thing is intel is not the bad guy in this case. globalfofundries has to license from intel they can’t transfer it from AMD and pay nothing to intel. globalfounderies is a company initself that can always give out intel patents to other companies because they have direct license with them and while many other company start using intel’s patens in a couple years AMD can argue that intel’s patens are now invalid or bring up the case that they’re using their monopoly powers against them, when in the case it isn’t so.
AMD wants intel’s patents to become invalid, or argue that intel is the bad guy while AMD’s patents are safe. that is why AMD is the bad guy here not intel. intel is just trying to keep their money maker keep making money, they have mouths to feed.they’re actively developing on their patents, they’re not just sitting on it over there and waiting for someone to cross it so they can sue.

I remember the P4 days when AMD was kicking Intel’s ass left and right, all my friends said AMD was the future. I had a wiff of the core 2 architecture and I told them intel is going to come back pretty hard. they majority of replies i got was that nothing Intel come up with will ever beat AMD.

Rick Hodgin

lennard, you seem like an Intel zealot, and your information about AMD’s wants is, to my knowledge, notably off track — I have seen no evidence that AMD is in breach. Intel’s claims notwithstanding — (Intel claimed they were innocent of anti-trust violations until Japan, South Korea and the EU proved them otherwise) — AMD is the one designing x86-based technology. Globalfoundries is only manufacturing it, and is not doing design. The fact that this hasn’t been a serious issue within the 60-day timeframe indicates to me very strongly that Intel was in the wrong, and that it’s a non-issue. But, we’ll see in the days to come I’m sure.

Rick Hodgin

The Geek.com comments system has got to fix this annoying non-standard carriage return issue.

lennard

doens’t anyone remember last year when AMD hired intel’s former employee that stole $1billion worth of trade secrets? here’s a link to the story http://www.seattlepi.com/business/386657_intelamd07.html (but it should be all over the net)
ok with that said, I know everyone remembers that AMD chips never had high overclockabilities before sometimes the most you could push out their lines were from 200 to 400mhz, but with intel you could somtimes double the default speed. now the other day amd said they have overclocked one of their chips from 3.2ghz to 6ghz….this all seems fishy to me, it seems they did get some of those trade sercrets they claimed they didn’t get.
all in all this means amd will release better chips for the consumer at intel’s cost. but I do beleive intel should be compensated for a all the R&D they did.

they are high clockers but before the employee there were really low clockers so what a coincidence huh?

Rick Hodgin

lennard, it’s AMD’s latest core revisions that make it so stable at high overclocked speeds … just as your “precious Core architecture” gave Intel the leg up in work per clock. BTW, did you notice how Intel switched to an AMD-like pipeline and ditched Netburst? And the on-die memory controller? And AMD’s QPI precursor, HT? Yeah, AMD had it right all along, didn’t they? :)

lennard

If I’m in intel “zealot”, then thats that, not a big problem one way or the other (note: I never clalled you any names in my comments to you) but I just want to say that in your article you stated ” There has been no notification by either company publicly about the current status, and the 60-day time period” but in your comments you stated “The fact that this hasn’t been a serious issue within the 60-day timeframe indicates to me very strongly that Intel was in the wrong”. its either you’re a walking oxymornon or you just deliberatly contradicted yourself just to prove that I’m wrong.

Rick Hodgin

lennard, I have very strong personal beliefs regarding Intel and AMD on this issue because I am exposed to behind-the-scenes information. I can’t always reveal that data publicly, but you would be amazed how often people “in the know” contact the press to tell them what it is they know. It helps those of us who do this for a living to maintain and augment our understanding of what’s really going on in the semiconductor industry. And for the record, the things I have stated in the opinion section or comments are entirely my opinion. They do not reflect Geek.com, or any parent company, or any other writer here. They are Rick C. Hodgin’s opinions. Period. :)

lennard

@rick, again you prove what I was saying, “AMD’s latest core revisions that make it so stable at high overclocked speeds” and this is where the coincidence comes in. I never really liked the netburst architechture, it was built to go at high speeds but it generated too much heat and intel never saw it coming, this is why the dichted the architecture derived from the p3 (which is now the core architecture) and went along with netburst because they were blinded by how high the architecture could go at remember at that time the prcessor with the high clock speed was seen as the fastest and greatest.

I never knew why intell never dichted the northn bridge along time ago, it has always been the bottleneck to their chips ( maybe they kept it because it was easy to through integrated graphics in there, this served a lot of OEMs pretty well because they didn’t have to go out and buy discreet graphic chips so this was why a lot of OEMs chose intel). AMD-like pipeline? where did you hear that? AMD made a good choice with the HT to me it was better than the FSB because there were less interconnection to pass through.
um, if I remember correctly on-die memory controller isn’t something amd invented, i think HT was an amd innovation though. I don’t think I would of used an HT or QPI though, there would be a lot of co-processors on my main board though.

Rick Hodgin

lennard, there was a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter that 130nm Tualatin Pentium IIIs were, even at the time prior to Northwood-A P4s, wiping the floor with P4 at lower clock speed. However, Intel had bet the farm on Netburst

lennard

@Rick: its quite lame of you to pull the elitist press card at this point in our conversation.

lennard

Rick, as i said they were blinded by how high the architecture could go but never took note of the heat…..maybe they thought through revisions they could control the heat. the netburst architecture was capable of reaching upwards of 9 to 10ghz.

Rick Hodgin

lennard, there was a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter that 130nm Tualatin Pentium IIIs were, even at the time prior to Northwood-A P4s, wiping the floor with P4 at lower clock speed. However, Intel had bet the farm on Netburst and RDRAM and was not going to back down — until AMD forced their hand, that was, and they had to turn it around lest AMD continue to take market share. And, it wasn’t until Northwood-B and follow-ups that Intel had any kind of even decent performer on their hands, but they still ran hot. And, it seems obvious from the Willamette days that the HyperThreading bloat was always present even back then, just not yet functioning (either in reality due to HTh bugs, or for production though hard- or BIOS-settings which simply disabled it as a feature), because it was suddenly switched on without any change in die size —- I’ll answer the rest in a little bit. Have to run out for a while.

Rick Hodgin

lennard, You said “AMD-like pipeline? where did you hear that? AMD made a good choice with the HT to me it was better than the FSB because there were less interconnection to pass through.” —— AMD’s pipeline was similar to that of the Pentium III. However, when Intel ditched the PIII design in favor of Netburst, Intel increased the pipeline depth to 20 stages with Willamette/Northwood, and with Prescott increased it to 31 stages. For Core architecture, they reverted back to the standard 12-integer/15-float, which is similar to the AMD64 design, as well as Pentium III’s previous 10-integer/15-float. —– AMD did not invent the on-die memory controller, but they were the first to (successfully) bring it to the x86 architecture. A previous Intel effort was cancelled (Timna) which would’ve had many of the features we are about to have from both Intel and AMD, including the on-die GPU. However, it failed and was never launched.

Rick Hodgin

lennard, the fastest overclock to date was 8.2 GHz using Pentium 4 and liquid nitrogen cooling. However, the workload of an 8.2 GHz P4 is likely that of the 6.5 GHz AMD64 overclocked earlier this year.